Qobuz on legacy platform streamers

Thanks for posting, I have in fact installed mconnect on my wife's iPad but I was not aware that it comes with a Qobuz interface. I tend to use BubbleUPnP as a control point and it has interfaces to most internet streaming services. I use upmpdcli as a UPnP renderer. It had interfaces to Qobuz and Tidal since I started to use it, thus I never systematically looked into the interfaces made available by the control points. But it's good to know that they are there and that they work. Why doesn't the Naim app implement these simple plugins? It does not appear to be rocket science! I have a Qobuz Sublime subscription (16/44.1) since last November and in the beginning I didn't use it so much. Meanwhile I use it much more. Sound quality wise I have no complains. But I do not like its interface very much. Also, they do not have Hyperion albums which is a pity. Best, nbpf   

Thanks HH, I was about to create a thread about two weeks ago when I realized someone had already mentioned mconnect in that respect (can’t recall who to give proper credit...).

@NBPF: very valid point about Hyperion, one of the reasons I still buy CDs!

I use BubbleUPnP running on a RPi to play Qobuz and Tidal streams... BubbleUPnP automatically discovers my legacy streamer, NDX, and allows you to assign it as a OpenHome renderer... and away you go.. and I use the free Lunin app on my iPad as the control point. All in all took about 10 minutes to setup..

Bloomin’ fantastic... the SQ, master permitting, is superb... and no real issue with dropouts... on my 3.8 Mbps ADSL access.. ( though we are actually now on the plan for FTTP)

Nigel & Simon,

How does the SQ, convenience and catalogue of Qobuz compare to Tidal?

Hi Nigel, I only have an active Tidal account currently... so can’t compare. I suspect however they should almost be or effectively be identical

Nigel, what you can do with LUMIN is play a track on Tidal via BubbeUPnP, and it can then search for a local copy on your media server, and then cue it up... and if you have multiple versions, I can often match locally to the master from Tidal... and to all intents and purpose, if not audio watermarked, they sound almost if not completely identical.

Simon-in-Suffolk posted:

...

Bloomin’ fantastic... the SQ, master permitting, is superb... and no real issue with dropouts... on my 3.8 Mbps ADSL access.. ( though we are actually now on the plan for FTTP)

True, no single dropout in months! Still, there seems to be an issue: sometimes, in the middle of a track, replay skips to the next track. If on the last track, it skips to the end. This does not happen very frequently but frequently enough to be very annoying. Perhaps once every few hours but, sometimes, also twice in the same album!

The issue has been discussed in a "Help Trouble Shooting Skip-to-next-track problem in my Streaming setup" thread in the CA forums and I have opened a ticket on the Open Source Projects system for upmpdcli-qobuz. It also seems to affect replay when Qobuz is accessed via BubbleUPnP server.

Works for me, too. Nice one. Just in-case the industry shifts away from Tidal to Qobuz!

Simon.

NBPF, I haven’t experienced that issue here. I am running BubbleUPnP on a Raspberry Pi... don’t know if that is relevant... 

The only issue I have is with LUMIN, when if I try and select a greyed out Tidal track from a playlist, because the streaming rights have been removed, with an extended press, the app sometimes bombs out... but if you reload no data is lost....

Synology>BubbleUPnP>Kazoo here. Very, very occasionally I get the track skip-to-next. I love Qobuz's selection and find the quality only fractionally below local streamed stuff (master for master) and certainly comparable with Tidal. 

Using a separate app is a bit of a pain, and I'd love Naim to integrate Qobuz - but admit it isn't happening any time soon (perhaps if Qobuz make a success of their projected USA launch?)

Now Hyperion - ECM have shown the way, so please follow in their steps - being able to stream ECM albums has meant I've bought more.

Hungryhalibut posted:

Now, I’m not taking the credit for finding this, it was a post by DrPo that alerted me to it, but I thought it might be worth a dedicated thread to give it more attention. 

I have been wanting to stream from Qobuz for ages. I tried a Chromecast dongle but wasn’t happy with the sound. I was also told about loading Bubble upnp on my Qnap, but that sounded too complicated. Anyway, DrPo’s post mentioned an app called mconnect, which costs £5.99. There is a free version but it has adverts and less functionality, but it’s fine for an experiment. The app has integrated Qobuz, so it’s simply a matter of logging into your Qobuz account, choosing the music and choosing your streamer via the ‘Play to’ button. It’s as easy as that. The app’s volume control works the Naim, so there is no need to have both apps open. 

Sound quality wise, it’s pretty good, not quite up to locally streamed music, but very listenable. I’ve compared the same track streamed from Qobuz with my local rip, and it’s certainly not an ‘urgh, that’s awful’ response when listening to Qobuz. If anyone wants Qobuz on their system it’s certainly worth trying the free app and a free month’s trial of Qobuz, as there is nothing to lose. 

Hopefully, one or two people may find this helpful, and once again, thanks to DrPo.

Thanks very much for this - tried it just now and it works a treat on my Uniti2/iPad.

Simon-in-Suffolk posted:

NBPF, I haven’t experienced that issue here. I am running BubbleUPnP on a Raspberry Pi... don’t know if that is relevant... 

The only issue I have is with LUMIN, when if I try and select a greyed out Tidal track from a playlist, because the streaming rights have been removed, with an extended press, the app sometimes bombs out... but if you reload no data is lost....

Glad to hear that you didn't run in any track skipping issue!

It's actually quite annoying and spooky and some albums seem to be more affected than others: I still have failed to replay Mahler's 5th symphony (Adam Fischer and the Düsseldorfer Symphoniker) from the beginning to the end without experiencing at least a track jump. Then, again, other albums play through without any problem. 

Track skipping issues have also been sporadically reported on the Linn forum. For instance, there is a 6 pages long "Qobuz skipping" thread devoted to apparently similar issues.

Qobuz streaming has been very reliable but I have noticed that I can easily induce inconsistent and spurious errors by playing around with the time settings of the renderer. In my case, this runs on a Raspberry Pi. It is possible that the jumps are related with time problems. This is also what some of the posts in the Linn thread seem to suggest. On the other hand, I get track jumps even if the time on the Pi is perfectly fine. I have also tried to temporarily stop ntp with no effects. Perhaps I'll try to reboot the router and see if the errors persist. 

I tried the Lumin control at a certain point some time ago but I eventually settled on Linn Kazoo for iOS and on BubbleUPnP for Android devices.

I bought mconnect, I think may be a year ago,  but I use it very little because MM / Audirvana can give me both Qobuz hires flac sublime+ and Tidal masters.

Nick Lees posted:

Synology>BubbleUPnP>Kazoo here. Very, very occasionally I get the track skip-to-next. ...

I have come across a post at page 4 of a "Qobuz skipping" thread on the Linn forum in which a contributor has reported frequent track skipping issues. In his case, it turned out that latency problems were responsible for the jumps. He finally managed to avoid the issues by replacing the default domain on his router with Google's public DNSs. I am just trying the same approach.

My silly question of the day - does using the bubble thing make Qobuz sound better than using mconnect? 

Nigel I have no idea - but BubbleUPnP is free and are some of its compatible control points

nbpf posted:

Nick Lees posted:

Synology>BubbleUPnP>Kazoo here. Very, very occasionally I get the track skip-to-next. ...

I have come across a post at page 4 of a "Qobuz skipping" thread on the Linn forum in which a contributor has reported frequent track skipping issues. In his case, it turned out that latency problems were responsible for the jumps. He finally managed to avoid the issues by replacing the default domain on his router with Google's public DNSs. I am just trying the same approach.

That really doesn't make much sense - once a stream has initiated the DNS has sone its stuff - and its strictly IP addresses from that point on.... latency is more about internet roundtrip latency between the server and your host - I get jumps on my NDX sometimes - but so far not on my Pi - where I assume it has larger transport segment buffers - and I am using a RPi2 with its larger IO bandwidth.

This makes sense to me actually, since Google DNS probably finds the most optimal route to the QoBuz server nearest to your location.
In my own experience, I have not come across hires streaming drop-offs since I switched to the Google public DNS for both ip4 and ip6.

Hungryhalibut posted:

My silly question of the day - does using the bubble thing make Qobuz sound better than using mconnect? 

In an exhaustive, thorough, and utterly authoritative test (having just loaded mconnect lite and worked out how to use it) that the track A Right Along by Poco sounds quite a bit better using BubbleUPnP - a bit richer and punchier rather than through mconnect*.

I will try harder tomorrow.

* the only transmission path difference I can think of is that the Bubble path goes router>NAS>router> NDX (using my ultra-swanky Chord Indigo network cable connecting NAS to router) rather than router>NDX. 

Frank Yang posted:

This makes sense to me actually, since Google DNS probably finds the most optimal route to the QoBuz server nearest to your location.
In my own experience, I have not come across hires streaming drop-offs since I switched to the Google public DNS for both ip4 and ip6.

Frank - the internet doesn't work like that......

DNS is simply used to convert a URL into an IP address... the media transfer packets use source and designation IP addresses - there is no URL at all involved once the the stream has started.

The route across the internet is down to the global routing tables in the main internet tiering routers - you have no control over that at all - and has nothing to do with IP address resolution at all.

Now the only thing that possibly be connected is if you use an old fashioned ISP who has an old DNS that is not being updated correctly and not supporting round-robin load balancing or similar  -  in which case it might refer to a host address that is not optimal due to server loading or other local matter - although most modern DNS clearly do this - as these days with major web services poor functionality here would leave poor performance for most things web related.

Simon-in-Suffolk posted:

Frank Yang posted:

This makes sense to me actually, since Google DNS probably finds the most optimal route to the QoBuz server nearest to your location.
In my own experience, I have not come across hires streaming drop-offs since I switched to the Google public DNS for both ip4 and ip6.

Now the only thing that possibly be connected is if you use an old fashioned ISP who has an old DNS that is not being updated correctly and not supporting round-robin load balancing or similar  -  in which case it might refer to a host address that is not optimal due to server loading or other local matter - although most modern DNS clearly do this - as these days with major web services poor functionality here would leave poor performance for most things web related.

 

Yes, that is exactly what I thought, I do not trust my ISP's DNS servers, over here we pay little attention to anything outside the US,  and both Tidal and Qobuz are non-US based.

In the interests of Big Science, I donned a white coat, fitted an anti-static strap to my delicate right foot, and compared three takes of Nik Turner’s End Of The World (mainly because I’d recently downloaded the 16/44 version from Qobuz). 

Excavating my finest Hi-Fi reviewer’s language from 40 years ago, I would confidently describe the Bubble stream “better” than mconnect’s. And the ripped (FLAC, not transcribed) version of the same “even better”. 

Thanks Nick, much appreciated. It seems I need to try Bubble. I’m going to need help!!

Hungryhalibut posted:

Thanks Nick, much appreciated. It seems I need to try Bubble. I’m going to need help!!

Nigel.. if you follow the guides on their web page, it is all straightforward, certainly on OSX or Windows... a little more involved on Linux platforms... but easier than setting up Minimserver.

Hi Nick, I did an experiment and ran my BubbleUPnP on the same ‘server’ (RPi) as my minimserver... and when I cued  up certain masters of the same both locally and remotely and in FLAC I couldn’t reliably tell the difference between the two on a blind listening test... however I do find my mediaserver on my Netgear NAS sounds very slightly preferable to either of my RPi2 servers (I have explained most probably why elsewhere on this forum)... I can’t run BubbleUPnP on my Netgear so can’t compare on that platform.